Albany hikes rental safety fees

Increase is first since 1996; Landlords asked for a more gradual hit

Updated 10:45 am, Tuesday, March 5, 2013

ALBANY — City lawmakers hiked fees for rental property inspections Monday night for the first time in 17 years, but over the objections of landlords who said the increase is too sudden, too steep and will be felt by tenants.

Apartment inspections will now cost $50 apiece — a plan that replaces a more-complex fee schedule that ranged from $30 per unit for the smallest buildings to a $250 fee plus $15 per unit for the largest.

For owners of buildings with up to five apartments, that's a 66 percent increase. For the owner of a 15-apartment building it would be a nearly 88 percent increase; and for a 25-apartment building, the hike would be 100 percent.

Larger buildings are hit harder because they previously benefited from a sliding scale that reduced the per-unit fee as the number of apartments rises.

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For the owners of the smallest buildings, Jamison said the increase amounts to an additional 67 cents per apartment per month.

But even with the hike, the program still won't pay for itself, losing an estimated $70,000 annually without efficiency improvements, said Jamison, whose agency was split from the fire department this year in hopes of improving its operations.

The vote came as a trade group that represents the owners of an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 apartments in the city said it thought it had reached a compromise to phase the increase in over the next five years, eventually hitting the $50 flat rate in 2017.

But that compromise apparently fell apart when the ordinance's sponsor, Councilman Joseph Igoe, said he could not back a plan that charged two different rates for the same inspection, a system that benefits larger property owners over smaller ones.

"An inspection is an inspection," Igoe said, backed by Jamison, who said he could not justify a two-tiered system.

Calsolaro called Feinman's plan "a reasonable compromise" and argued the red ink generated by fees that may be too low pales in comparison to the $336,000 in stipends the city pays firefighters to perform the inspections even though they stopped doing the work last year after the city hired eight new code inspectors. "We're paying two sets of people to do one job," Calsolaro said. "To me, that's a bigger issue than $45 or $50."

Jennings' aides have countered that the firefighters' stipends are contractual and that the city is working to eliminate them either through negotiations or arbitration.